Why isn’t this being shown on TV?
That’s the question I found myself asking after watching a recent performance by the great jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant at the gorgeous Strathmore Music Center just outside Washington, D.C. Strathmore is the place where I recently enjoyed and interviewed another jazz great, Kurt Elling. With Elling, as with Salvant, I couldn’t help but wonder why these greats are not known to most Americans the way the names Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington once were—and, among the culturally literate, still are.
And then it hit me. The reason is that at some point the gatekeepers with access to the biggest platforms stopped promoting America’s great art and artists and, instead, began to showcase our worst, most obnoxious, or “most controversial” figures. This wasn’t always the case. For example, jazz performers used to appear regularly not only on public television but on mainstream programs like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Twenty years ago the critic Martha Bayles observed that the popular culture America was exporting to the rest of the world was largely crap. Our nation had gone from the Voice of America exporting jazz during the Cold War—the uniquely American form of music she called “a secret weapon” promoting freedom—to sending our raunchy sit-coms and gansta rap. Bayles added:
Join the conversation as a VIP Member